“Halloo the camp!”
“Who’s there?” I slid the long-knife out, solid and ready in my hands. What kind of fool, I wondered, comes barging through the forest like that, making more noise than a bunch of cider-drunk brush-sheep? Not northers, that was sure. Not Rangers, not even Montborne’s assassins...
The man from the Blue Star stables, that was who. He rode up on a rangy, flea-bit roan and for a moment I just stood and stared at him. I couldn’t think what he was doing here, since he had nothing to do with Avi or the Rangers or the kid or Montborne. When he saw me, his whole face lit up.
“Etch!” Terris pushed past me and ran up to him. “Etch! You came after me!”
What the hell is going on?
I started sweating, about to jump out of my skin and a whole lot madder than I’d thought. I wanted help for Avi, a way around Montborne’s orders, not some Mother-damned plot with Esmelda’s finger on every turning, a war with the north and the Rangers caught in the middle of it all.
The man swung down and gave Terris a slap on the back that half knocked him down. “Couldn’t let you ride off, get yourself into Harth’s own sweet mess, even with the magistra here” — a lop-grinned, twinkle-eyed glance in my direction that only made me madder — ”to teach you a thing or two.”
His face sobered when he noticed the bodies. “Seems I’m a bit late.”
These two know each other? It took me a moment of pissedness to find my brains again, and pissed is the worst thing you can be in a tweak. It makes you feel instead of act. Now I knew how the kid found me so easy and where he got that nice-moving sorrel, him without the sense to know one end of a horse from the other.
I shoved the long-knife back in its sheath. “You coming with us?”
“I meant to,” he answered quietly, turning back to the kid. “After you left, I couldn’t stop thinking. Thinking about all those years since I lost the ranch, patching up other men’s horses, selling them again, one day no better than the next. That mare — the one you helped me with — she died the next morning. Some kind of internal bleeding. The vet said he couldn’t have saved her, she should never’ve been bred again. And that crapping contaminated owner, all he said was he wouldn’t pay the vet bill.” His face clouded over, remembering. “So I told him to take it out of my last pay.”
Terris nodded, eyes down, and chewed on his lip. “H — how did you find me?”
“Nobody I talked to remembered seeing you. I followed her.”
The kid’s face lightened, relieved.
“This is no simple go-find, even if you do have a sister out there,” Etch said. “You want to tell me what’s really going on?”
Terris glanced in my direction, careful, used to watching and following. Damned bitch mother trained him hard. But this one was not mine to call. Last night I told him that what I thought didn’t matter, and I was righter than either of us knew. About knives and woodscraft, yes, but not about this.
But there was more here than even what Terris told me, secrets he felt in his bones as if they were bred there. Secrets leading back to that old dragon, Esmelda. Now the stakes were more than help for Avi, who might be dead anyway. Now it was his life, and mine too maybe, if the demon god of chance looked the other way, and Etch’s...and what more?
I watched Terris’s eyes, the tightness in his belly. I could feel what he was thinking. That the choice was his alone. And that a man needed to know what he might die for.
...and up on the funeral mount with death chants ringing in my ears and the bloodbats hovering, churning the dry steppe air with their stinking wings, the hot blood running down my sides — what was supposed I to die for?
An instant later, when I could breathe again, Terris was saying to Etch, “I don’t expect you to believe any of this. In your place I wouldn’t, either.” He told the story simply, all in one piece. There was something in his voice, some hint of steel, that made me believe him. I felt it in my bones, in my blood, and I knew the man Etch felt it, too.
Terris took the wrapped dagger from his travel pack, tied behind the sorrel’s saddle. He held it out, but Etch made no move to touch it. “This is an exact duplicate of the dagger used to kill Pateros, a fake so good it fooled even Orelia’s experts. My body was supposed be found with this in it.”
Etch’s eyes twitched but his voice was calm enough. “Why would Montborne want to kill you?”
“I’m the son of Esmelda of Laurea.” Steel again. Steel and truth.
Etch let out a long, expressive whistle. “And the rest of it? The Ranger sister?”
“All true.”
Etch looked down at the reins in his hands. He couldn’t go back to Laureal City. None of us could go back to what we were before. “Where do we go from here?”
“We’ll take the dagger back to Laureal City,” Terris said after a pause. “We’ll tell the whole truth. When it’s time.”
“Well, then,” Etch said after a breath or two, “I reckon we’d better turn these horses loose. It’ll be months before they find their way home, and that’s assuming some farmer doesn’t adopt them along the way.”
“Or the wolves get them,” said Terris, half-shudder. The moment of steel passed, leaving the raw, earnest kid once more.
“Wolves’re carrion eaters, more noise than fight,” I told him. Then to Etch, “We could use an extra horse. We’ll take the brown, he looks trail-wise.”
Etch nodded and began rigging the brown’s gear into a pack saddle. We took extra grain for our own horses, a third tent, and spare blankets. Before we started out, I had Terris bury the second saddle well away from the camp. He came back looking like it did him good to bury something. The rusty black wandered after us, head down to browse, until the green forage won over the company of other horses and we lost him.
The forest thinned out as we climbed, rocks pushing out of the sides of the hills like famine bones. It was drier here, twist-bark and scrubby herbs like sauge and bat-bane. The horses flared their nostrils at the smell. Little gusts of wind pulled at my hair and whipped the blood to my face.
Each time was the first time on the edge of Kratera Ridge, always different, always the same. Avi and I had ridden here, full of scorn for the weirdings that frightened the others. It had been enough to be alive and with her.
“Your past or mine, it’s all the same,” she’d said, gray eyes dancing. “We’ll bury them together!”
The first of the strange places I hardly noticed, just a twinge up the back of my throat. But Avi spun around, her knife ready in her free hand. Her randy little gelding, cut too late to keep him from acting whole, squealed and crow-hopped. She pulled him short, cursing, but I could see her face had gone ashy white. Her hand shook as she slipped her knife back into its sheath.
A trick of sunlight, nothing more...
That’s what I told her then, and that’s what I told Terris. That’s all most of us could see, a shimmer like a wave of heat or a flicker that wasn’t not quite there when you looked right at it. A prickle in the hairs along your neck. A feeling...not of being watched, that feeling I’d recognize, that I could deal with. I didn’t know what this was.
What I did know was that whatever it was Avi saw then, whatever lurked behind the twists of sun and shadow, was more than I could see, or any Ranger. It was like an old wound that I’d lived with so long I didn’t think about it most of the time. Etch clearly didn’t know what to believe. His eyes went jumpy and he patted his roan mare on the shoulder as if she were the one needed soothing.
Terris held on to the pommel with both hands, reins slack, letting the trail-wise gelding pick his own pace. Suddenly he swayed in the saddle, as if he were about to fall off. His eyes stretched wide and blank. The gelding, balance upset or perhaps sensing something I couldn’t see, snorted and stumbled. Terris pulled himself straight. I could almost see him shaking.
I slowed up in the broad knuckle of a switchback and let him come even with me.
“That was...a trick of sunlight?” he said. “Nothing more?” With a deep-drawn breath, the color came seeping back into his skin.
I nodded slowly.
“That was no trick. I saw...”
“What?”
He brought his hands up as if to outline something, then let them drop. His fingers, once soft and pale, were covered with calluses and ground-in trail dirt, the nails broken by mending harness straps and picking stones out of the horses’ hooves.
Etch kneed his roan beside us. He was sweating a little, his voice too loud. “When I was little, we used to talk about a ‘tracter’ running over your grave, something that’s there and not there. The sort of thing that only cowards pay attention to.”
Terris nodded and took another deep breath. He pointed across the little valley to the far hillside. “There’s another one there, too.”
“You can see them?” Etch said, amazed.
“Avi could...see...them, too,” I said.
Terris brightened like a child. “Can she?”
Avi... It was like calling up a ghost, her memory. The touch of her lips on my hair. The smile in her rainwater eyes, the slow turning of her head. Away from me, always away from me and toward the twist of sunlight. Never looking directly at it, but drawn, as if it pulled her someplace I couldn’t follow.
For a long moment, Terris’s eyes went dark, unfocused. He swayed, grabbed the pommel of his saddle.
“Another weirdie?” I’d felt nothing.
He shook his head. His shoulders tensed. “I saw Esme standing in front of the Starhall.”
“Remembering her, you mean,” Etch said.
“No.” His voice was firm but troubled. “She was wearing the Guardian’s medallion.” He looked right at me, as if he were searching for answers in my eyes and finding none. “Is it the future I see, or only some twist of wishful thinking? We can’t go back to find out.”
He had the right of it. We could only go on.
We made camp early in a gravelly hollow with a little grove of ashleaf and the best forage I’d seen all afternoon, and a trickle of a stream. I didn’t know that we’d find any place better, and I was no good for traveling on. Each passing hour I’d gotten more and more jumpy, until now it was as if one of those twisty places had worked its way under my hide. Finally Terris and Etch stopped trying to talk to me. They went to set up the tents and fire ring by themselves.
Terris asked Etch about some incident in a bar in Laureal City.
“Jekk’s been picking on greenies for more years than I can count,” Etch said, shaking his head. “That wasn’t the first time I had to step in. Sometimes a bar fight is just a bar fight.”
I’d heard enough. I hobbled the horses and left them to browse, found a smoothed-off rock surrounded by wild mimosa and rosemarie, and sat down to think. The smell of the flowers and the chomping of the horses lulled my body but not my nerves.
The deeper we traveled into the Ridge, the worse everything seemed. I couldn’t bring Terris to the fort when I delivered the papers — too many questions like, Esmelda’s son, here? There was Etch, farmbred as they come, and how the hell was I going to explain him?
If Montborne put those goons on Terris’s trail, did he know the kid was with me? Would he have sent orders in case we made it past his killers — orders about the kid? about me?
Too crotting suspicious, that’s what I’m getting. Run with Esmelda’s cub and that’s what it gets me.
What if I just rode off and left these two to the search they’d taken on themselves? I could go back the fort, back to being a Ranger, first and only. Back to dreams of bloodbats circling...
Ay Mother! I don’t know what to do. Help me.
She didn’t answer me. She never did.
It was chance, the demon god, I ought to pray to. He was the one who threw me in with Terris and now Etch. The one who laughed in my face whenever I thought I knew what I was doing.